Karen Barnes wrote on Sat, 16 November 2002 17:24 > What I suspect is users are searching with the "*" wildcard. I found this to consume >all memory of the machine. In fact you can do this at aspseek.com and their machine >will time out before returning any results (depending on the query). If we had access >to their server we would most likely find > aspseek ate up all memory for this search.
First of all I should say that wildcard queries are much "heavier" than normal ones, so it takes much CPU time and other system resources to perform them. Thus, an option MinFixedPatternLength was added (see man 5 searchd.conf or http://www.aspseek.org/man/searchd.conf.5.php for description). Basically, if you set an argument to >31, this really disables wildcard search (as ASPseek does not store words with length of >32). To the memory problem, I should say 1. Always use the latest stable version (1.2.10 at the moment), as other versions can have some memory leaks fixed before 1.2.10 (see ChangeLog for details). 2. As wildcard search really operates on huge data amounts, internal searchd caches have more possibility to be filled with it. This is _normal_; if you have problems with that, just buy more RAM or shrink your database. -- -- kir
